Underqualified for the Overrated

Corrections (published Oct. 14, 2009): The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, not Stockholm, as originally reported.
(Published Oct. 21, 2009): The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees won the award twice. The original version of this story omitted that organization's 1981 prize.

Alfred Nobel had one odd thing in common with Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway and Marcus Garvey. He had the chance to read about his own death in the newspapers. It seems that he was so depressed by the emphasis that the obituarists laid on his pioneering work on dynamite—the WMD of its day—that he resolved at once to upgrade his real death notice by endowing an award for international peace.

But if "premature" is the word for Nobel's scanning of reports of his own demise, then it is also the most polite word for the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to our 44th president in the first year of his first term. Up until now, the annual awards for "peace," bestowed by right-thinking Scandinavians, have been of five distinct types:

1. For service to diplomacy and realpolitik. In this category might fall Theodore Roosevelt—no peace-lover—for his part in negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese war, that now-forgotten disaster that presaged both the First World War and the Russian Revolution. One might add here the other awards to statesmen who were still active politicians, such as Chancellor Willy Brandt of (then) West Germany in 1971 and Mikhail Gorbachev, effectively the last leader of the Soviet Union, in 1990.

2. For service to cynicism, opportunism, and hypocrisy. Here we find Yasir Arafat and Henry Kissinger, along with their Israeli and North Vietnamese counterparts, garlanded for "peace" agreements that were not intended to hold and that led to later outbreaks of lethal violence. (It has to be said of Le Duc Tho, Kissinger's Stalinist co-laureate from Hanoi, that he had the grace to decline his share of the award.) Of the Kissinger prize, which led to the unprecedented sight of Norway's beloved old King Olaf being pelted with snowballs in the streets of Oslo, the Turin newspaper La Stampa editorialized acidly that it was "an encouragement to those who would declare war only to be able to stop it again," which, with its implicit vice versa, is a pretty good encapsulation of the last Israeli-Palestinian prize as well.

3. For service to human rights. These may or may not have something or anything to do with peace, though the terms of Alfred Nobel's bequest do specify those who "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." Few would doubt that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. honored the spirit if not the letter of this rubric, though it is hard to see how it applies to Agnes Bojaxhiu, more widely known to the media as Mother Teresa, who never claimed to be working for peace and who announced in her acceptance speech that the chief threat to world peace was abortion. By even nominating Carl von Ossietzky in 1935, when he was in a German concentration camp, and Andrei Sakharov four decades later, the Nobel committee may not have helped avert or shorten any war, but it did honor human rights and the human spirit. There is a growing case for a separate or specific prize that does just that, and only that.

4. For service to random but vague feelings of good will. You might have thought that 1946 would have been a good year for Mohandas K. Gandhi, known to Hindus as "the Mahatma." I might not agree, but I do think the first year of the postwar era was an absurd time to give the prize to Emily Balch and John Mott, the latter perhaps best known for his efforts as an international officer of the YMCA. The history of the peace prize is littered with such quaint absurdities, often weighted toward superannuated French and Belgian dignitaries, or overpoliticized groups like Amnesty International.